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The past is pervasive; it seeps into everything;... And yet because the past is irreplaceable and cannot be done again, it was that very past, not the present or the future, that was so delicate, so vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase.

The best thing fishing taught me, I think was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association.

The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility.

...what has become my frequent prayer since I have had to face death -"Thy holy will, O Lord, not mine be done!"

Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others.

Solitude—the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself—is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature—if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature—consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The whole motley confusion of acts, occasions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

I realized that there is nothing whatever outside of the life we have; that the "meaning of life" is nothing other than life itself, obstinately asserting itself against emptiness and nullity.

We all come into the world with baggage which, in the end, we have no hope of reclaiming, The main item in mine was my father.

...A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man,"

I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching.

Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.